Say What? The Importance of Dialogue

Definition Dialogue is the part of the narrative that indicates conversation between two or more characters Write this down in your notes.

Why Use Dialogue? 1. By having your character speak, you can give the readers some insight into the character’s personality. 2. Having characters speak makes the story less boring-- helps bring the characters to life. 3. Having your characters speak can help you build suspense. 4. It looks good on an assessment.

easy-to-understand dialogue Why is producing easy-to-understand dialogue important? 1. It gives the reader a chance to easily detect a change of speaker when one occurs. 2. It gives the reader a chance to easily tell the characters spoken words from unspoken words. 3. It gives the reader a chance to easily distinguish the story’s dialogue elements from it’s purely narrative elements.

Rules for Written Dialogue 1. A character’s direct speech is always enclosed in quotation marks. 2. A character’s direct speech is always separated from any indirect speech by a comma or an end mark of some sort, with these punctuation marks always inside the quotation marks. 3. If a character delivers direct speech in multiple, uninterrupted sentences, only a single set of quotation marks is required. 4. Begin a new paragraph every time there is a change of speaker.